A flying lesson

An aircraft took off for a short scheduled flight. As it climbed to cruising altitude, a blade came away from the left hand engine and caused a fire. There was smoke in the cabin and several passengers on the left side of the aircraft noticed flames and sparks from the left hand engine. The captain and pilot decided (wrongly) that it was the right hand engine – for various good reasons.

They shut down the right hand (good) engine and continued to fly to the divert airfield using the left hand engine which was well and truly on fire by now. The captain announced to the passengers and the cabin crew that there was a fire in the right hand engine and they were diverting – nothing to worry about, he said, the aircraft was quite capable of flying on one engine.

There were 6 cabin crew in the team and they all knew the captain had shut down the wrong engine. But not a single one of them dared go and tell him.

Certain quotes about leadership can remind us of certain stories, and this is certainly one of them.

Clear the epidemic

This is no way to run a business. If you’ve heard or read about the Kegworth air disaster, you’ll know that the unfortunate incident ended in a total of 47 fatalities – which could have been prevented if someone had only said what everyone knew was right.

You and I should never have people working for us so fearful of questioning us or their colleagues that they dare not tell us if we are wrong. There is a fine line between imposing authority and arousing fear. We can accomplish a whole lot more with a team who speak up than one with a bad case of captainitis. Passive cooperation demotivates the workers, wears out the leader and harms the company – I never fired anyone for telling me I was wrong. That’s a good quote about leadership right there.

Higher up

If you’re leading a bigger unit there will be middle managers within your unit who might be more “bosses” than leaders. And since you cannot and must not be looking over everyone’s shoulder the entire day, these things will go unnoticed. Your team are not statistics. Be close to them so you can get a glimpse of what’s going on. When you’re leading them well, they’ll tell you themselves.

However, nobody said this was easy. New employees will be anywhere between two extremes: those who speak their mind immediately and all the time, and those who need a bit of prodding and support from their managers before they speak up. Some people need some time to get accustomed to their new environment, to test the waters and to become acclimatised to the organisation before they decide whether or not it’s a safe avenue for their thoughts and ideas to be heard.

Running a company or a department is more or less like running an aircraft. You’re the boss; be a leader. Whether you’re dealing with new colleagues or long-serving ones, It is your job every day to give them that sense of security and confidence without having to compromise leadership, so that they’ll tell you if you have turned off the wrong engine.

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“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.” – Thomas Jefferson

How can you and I possibly use this leadership quote?

Non-verbal and unconscious communication

We all know that our non-verbal communication makes up a large proportion of the messages we send out and those which people receive. There are many numbers thrown around and studies show numbers above 80 per cent for the non-verbal portion of communication. An increasing volume of modern research and several other quotes on leadership and psychology clarify just how much influence our unconscious brain has on our conscious activity. Again, there is a good deal of research which shows that our brain has reached a decision long before our conscious and rational mind believes it decides.

What are you communicating?

“You cannot not communicate” – this is one of the so-called “presuppositions” of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). Think about it. Maybe you’ve even read some other quotes on leadership or communication about it. If you say nothing, you are communicating; if you say something, are you communicating only what you say or are you communicating other things in parallel? Exactly what are you communicating and how does it match your intentions? Have you checked?

You will be watched!

As a leader, you will be watched more than most by those you lead. Give a good deal of thought to what you say and do. People will receive affirmations, contradictions and all manner of communications from you whether you mean to transmit them or not. Be consistent with your vision and values as you go about your day. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Act as if all the world were watching”.

Please don’t blame them

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said” – Peter Drucker

I agree with Peter Drucker. As he says, “It is the recipient who communicates.” The message is received on the recipient’s terms and the terms must be based on experience. Remember, if you try to communicate things which people don’t expect or have not experienced, they will not receive that communication – and you will not have communicated. Please don’t blame them. Adjust your transmissions so that they are tuned in to receive. Support them in this and you will achieve far more through others.

Reflect on your listening skills

Now is a good time to take stock of how you communicate, how well you communicate, what you want to communicate and how this all fits in with your vision and your leadership. Sit back for a few minutes and reflect on your listening skills.
Listen with your eyes as well as your ears. Watch for non-verbal clues. Become an observer. Avoid becoming “one who speaks and listens to himself speak”.

Listen with an open mind, gather all the incoming information, both verbal and non-verbal and be careful not to ignore things you don’t wish to hear. Don’t make assumptions or jump to conclusions. The punchline usually comes at the end!

This takes practice and skill. Unlike many things, we are born with a great listening skill but it is very easy to lose it as we grow up.

A different twist

To put a different twist on one of the best quotes on leadership from Benjamin Disraeli: you must follow what people say. Are you not their leader?

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“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” – Charles Darwin

How can you and I possibly use this leadership quote?

This statement by Charles Darwin, in the context of his theory of natural selection and the Origin of Species, can also cause you and me to think also about the survival and development of organisations and businesses.

Will it be different in five years?

As a young salesman working in the automotive industry in the early 1980s, I remember sitting outside the office of the Purchasing Manager of Vauxhall Motors, a branch of General Motors in Luton, England. On the glass wall of his office was the statement “If you are still doing things today in the same way that you were doing them five years ago, then you are doing them the wrong way”. My goodness, five years! Nowadays, I would say one year.

Vauxhall Motors are still making cars in England – although not in Luton. But my goodness, it was close, like it was for a lot of other firms in the last few years. And that’s why this famous leadership quote reminded me of this story.

Additive manufacturing

Consider manufacturing. Have you looked at additive manufacturing? If you make things, how will this affect what you do? Many people will soon have a printer in their homes which can produce solid objects from plastic powder. If you don’t make things, how will additive manufacturing affect what you and your customers do?

Get used to it!

Consider social media. Are you using the social media to interact with your customers and your prospective customers? I am continually amazed by my customers who are not using any of the opportunities to grow. “We’ve tried that and it didn’t work” is a common statement. Well it’s working for many businesses in all sectors. It’s not going away and one thing is for sure – it will all be different in one year from now. Not in five! We need to get used to it.

Like a Swiss watch?

Let’s think about the strongest industries and we will soon bring to mind those which were strong and did not survive. Take a look at what happened to the Swiss watch companies as the quartz movement arrived. Many survived and they are now in a completely different form and place from their original very strong position.

Clever but not here…

An intelligent organisation could also be considered a clever one. Arthur Andersen was one of the “big five” accounting companies. It was certainly intelligent and clever – but it’s not here any more in any form similar to it’s previous strength.

Would they survive?

Which companies are responsive to change? There are many and they are the ones which are still here. It is not fashionable to quote IBM as successful – but take a look at their history. Many and sometimes huge changes in their business model – who would have thought they would even survive in the late 90s as Microsoft had dominated the PC software market? The way IBM re-invented itself is well worth a read. Start by Googling them and reading the Wikipedia article on them.

Survival is not mandatory

You know that I often urge you to take stock in the light of the thoughts of a great leader from the past. It’s worth you and I sitting back and looking at our processes, our ways of working. We must keep a close eye on the way things are now, not the way things were 5 years ago. We need to make sure we are operating in the way which works for our customers in this current whirlpool environment.

As one of my heroes, W Edwards Deming said in one of his most famous leadership quotes, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory”.

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What does Socrates mean by the word “move” in this profound quote? The easy answer is to translate the word “move” into the word “change”. That may be easy and you can interpret his quote in that way. I prefer to read the word “move” as “produce emotional reaction in somebody”. What does it mean when Socrates says that if we want to produce an emotional reaction in the world, we must first produce that emotional reaction in ourselves?

What does Socrates know about irony?

It is ironic that all the new thinking around the brain function, decision-making and logic should be so accurately reflected in the quote from Socrates which is the headline of this article. We now understand that 2,500 years of belief about the way to enquire and debate was flawed.

I was trained in the fundamentals of selling using the classical selling methods, developed mainly in the US during the 20th century. I learnt from a master salesman, a true professional who would never have been called pushy -and he was good, very good. I didn’t realise what it was called at the time but I modelled him. That means that I copied him and tried hard to learn what he did. That meant copying his processes and that was what gave me the structure to learn to sell.

Logical left brain

You probably know this stuff. Prospecting, door-knocking, using the alternate close to make the appointment. Then, going on to presenting, working through the process. Next is the handling of objections. Part of it was to use the logical left brain to prove rationally to the prospect that it was obvious that they should buy the product. Sometimes we used the tool which we called the Winston Churchill close and which I believe the Americans call the Benjamin Franklin close. This involves helping the prospect to list the reasons to buy and then letting the prospect list the reasons not to buy. All very logical stuff, all very “left brain”.

Wrapped in passion

This was all wrapped up in my passion and conviction for the product. A lot of my passion and conviction came from the fact that I was taught about the product by the master salesman. Because the passion for the product came over and because I had stories about how it was made and how it had solved problems for people, I was able to relate directly to the prospect’s problems and they were able to relate directly with me and with the product. Of course, I didn’t know at the time that I was actually relating right brain to right brain and engaging the primitive reptile or limbic brain of the prospect.

Understanding the reptile brain

Over the last 15 or 20 years, there have been some huge strides in the understanding of the way that our brains work. What we now know is that all decision-making goes on at a level beneath our logical brains. Socrates certainly couldn’t have known that and neither could my master salesman mentor. However, they did know instinctively and by logical deduction that emotions are the way to move people. And this is how we can “move the world,” so to speak, from the mouth of Socrates himself in the leadership quote above.

The irony and the emotion

The irony for us is that Socrates was right(!). If we as leaders (or salespeople or in fact, anybody else in any walk of life) wish to influence other people’s decisions – shall we say “move” them – we must first move ourselves. We must believe and be passionate about what we want first. We must learn to tell our stories with deep feeling and emotion and then we can move the world.

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“It is a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test” – Elbert Hubbard

How can you and I possibly use this leadership quote?

Special lockers

Imagine that you have provided a special set of lockers at the entrance to your business. They are special because they are each equipped with a brain life support system. Imagine the lockers are placed near to where everyone passes as they enter your premises. Each time one of your colleagues, your workforce, arrives, they have a hinged lid on top of their heads and they are able to lift out their brains and put them into the locker for safe keeping on life support idle while the owner’s body is at ‘work’. The brain can then be collected on departure at the end of the day.

Do you have any people in your business who are acting like that?

I first discovered this phenomenon whilst running a factory making injection moulded plastic parts for cars. It was in the early 80s, well before my introduction to the enlightened ways of W Edwards Deming and well before the availability of modern computers.

Searching round

One of our best machine operators, Ian, was running a big injection moulding machine, producing handbrake parts. We had some urgent quality issues and needed to start gathering and analysing some dimensional data. The quality manager and I had some challenges with resources. We were searching round for someone we thought could handle the sums for the data analysis. Phone calls were made, requests to other business units, etc, but there wasn’t an obvious answer. It wasn’t a long job for each moulding but the machine produced 60 parts an hour, about 450 a day. Not only did we need the analysis in a timely fashion but the backlog of a day’s worth of data each day would soon become a mountain to climb.

The quality manager and I were discussing this before the start of a management meeting. The tool room foreman asked if we’d found a way. “No, but it’s becoming a bigger issue. We’re having to use one of the accounts clerks for a couple of hours a day but that’s not gone down well with the Finance Director”. “Is Ian still running the machine?” asked the tool room foreman. “Yes,” I said, “he’s the best we have”. “Did you know he runs our football club?”

If thought you’d never ask!

Well, I didn’t know. Neither had I thought of asking whether he could do the data crunching. I went straight over to his machine as soon as the meeting was finished. “I thought you’d never ask!”, he said. Of course, he could do the data crunching. For the football club he was organising the fixture list, and running the bar including ordering the stock and all the book-keeping. We quickly went through what was needed and Ian said it would be no problem to run it within the cycle time of the machine. The data was crunched, the analysis completed and the results were used in our efforts to minimise the quality issues.

An obvious error

With hindsight, it’s an obvious error on my part to miss asking the operator to be more involved. You can imagine that I was much more aware of abilities and capabilities as I moved through my career. And I believe this is exactly what Elbert Hubbard meant in this great leadership quote.

How good are we at making sure we spot abilities, skills and knowledge in our colleagues? Are we encouraging the use of brain lockers or do we make sure the brains are fully in use all day every day? How do we make sure? Being aware is a big step forward.

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